Does capacity increase compliance? Examining evidence from European cooperation against air pollution
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Does capacity increase compliance? Examining evidence from European cooperation against air pollution Andreas Kokkvoll Tveit1,2 Accepted: 12 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Scholars commonly hypothesize that enhanced capacity—improved ability to do as agreed—increases states’ compliance with international agreements. In contrast, using a novel dataset that covers 31 states and three decades of cooperation, I find a negative effect of capacity on compliance. To help explain this seemingly counterintuitive finding, I offer a novel conjecture of the capacity–compliance relationship. In particular, I argue that the effect of capacity may vary substantially across states, because states’ intention to comply constitutes a crucial intervening variable. Among reluctant states pursuing policy goals that affect compliance negatively, high capacity may in fact cause noncompliance. I exemplify the conjecture through evidence from a high-capacity noncompliant state (Norway). Keywords International environmental agreements · Air pollution · Compliance · International relations · State capacity
1 Introduction What factors determine states’ compliance with international environmental agreements (IEAs)? Proponents of the management school such as Chayes and Chayes (1993) argue that lack of capacity—states’ ability to do as agreed—constitute a crucial barrier to compliance. Specifically, they hypothesize that the likelihood of compliance depends on scientific, technical, bureaucratic, and fiscal resources (Chayes and Chayes 1993, 194). Despite the considerable scholarly attention Chayes and Chayes have received, the capacity explanation of noncompliance remains understudied. Moreover, the findings of previous studies (both within and without the IEA literature) are surprisingly inconclusive: Although some studies find the expected positive effect, several others report a zero effect (Jacobson and Brown Weiss 1998; Breitmeier et al. 2006; Mastenbroek 2005; Börzel et al. 2010). Using a series of regressions, I assess the effect of states’ capacity on compliance with the emissions targets of five protocols under the Convention on Long-range Transboundary * Andreas Kokkvoll Tveit [email protected] 1
Institute of Transport Economics – Norwegian Centre for Transport Research, Oslo, Norway
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Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
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A. K. Tveit
Air Pollution (CLRTAP). My highly robust results do not reveal the expected positive effect of state capacity on compliance; rather, the effect is negative1 across a number of model specifications. In contrast to most previous studies, I control for the ambitiousness of each emissions target (i.e., the size of the required emissions reductions). Acknowledging the challenges associated with measuring state capacity (Hendrix 2010), I use several alternative operationalizations. Because states may display different behavior toward different pollutants under the same regulatory regime (Murdoch et al. 1997), I report checks showing that my re
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